


like the time and the tide

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [1]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Class Issues, Earth-3, Fire, Gen, How Bruce Took Over The Court Of Owls, How J Came To Gotham, Mirror Universe, Origin Story, Secret Society Politics, Water, the kindness of strangers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-11 18:23:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10471206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Look. Andlisten.You can hear the city breathing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Accidental post! I hit the post button instead of preview. Oh well here it is, I will have to add frivolous things like a summary as supplements.

Look.

And _listen_.

This is Gotham City.

A river city, with her face turned ever toward the water, cupped in the wide mouth of her river valley where it yawns into the sea, and spilling up over its stone shoulders as if she were no more than a gray and spiky sort of stole that the land has shrugged on in an unfriendly mood.

Cold, always a few degrees colder than she should be, and dim, as if even in the daylight it is night, here. Dark stone, mullioned glass. Narrow side-streets and deep, twisting tunnels, echoing with chilly wind. A vague yearning toward past glories that never quite were. Gargoyles by the legion leer down from her rooftops and perch in crevices and cornices, like patient demons waiting for you to notice they have been in your life all along.

But she is not a ghost town, or a necropolis, or Pandemonium at the heart of Hell. She is a real, living city, filled with tiny, vital beings that are quite as real as she, and very present, pinning her to _now_ and _this_ in all their hopes and butterfly-fragile dreams, in all their petty frustrations and deep sorrows.

Listen. You can hear her breathing.

She has brooded here beside the wind-tossed sea for—not for always. There is no city on the Earth that has stood always, or even for long at all, as the mountains count time. And she is younger than many: the first oaken beams that would become part of her were raised less than four centuries ago, and for less time even than that has she had any real claim to the dignity of ‘ _city_.’ Earlier still, the valley dimly remembers other houses, wood-woven; strong, but never meant to stand for the ages—but these were not Gotham. They were some other thing, one she has displaced, devoured, and would not mourn for even if she had a heart that could encompass unselfish grief.

Counted in human heartbeats, however, she is old enough. Old enough to have come into herself, to sit between wind and sea, jealously hoarding the lives without which she is nothing, merely a heap of tumbled stone; old enough to brood lovingly over the stories without which she is no more than a warren of two-legged mice.

It is said that she is cruel, and this is so. It is said that she is evil, but this cannot be—to be good or evil one must _choose_ , and Gotham simply _is._

It is said that she is a place of madness, and this is certain, but whether that speaks well or ill of her is harder to say, since the same flame that leaps into the rafters and burns the hall down around the warriors at their feasting was first kindled in the hearth, to keep back the cold.

Mankind would, after all, be very different—would be so much _less_ —without that piled rubble of outrageous notions that _worked_ , and became commonplaces, and laid the brick of what are called now civilizations. Without the irrational, reckless bravery of heroes, and the courage they spark in other hearts even as mere stories, long after their bones are dust. It would be a grave misfortune if ever men and women ceased to be _just mad enough_.

Gotham knows. She knows humankind as she knows herself.

And in this time, in this place, this is the story she tells:

In the city, there is a Court which has no King.

There is a man who lives and breathes darkness, and the will to power.

There is a long, dark gallery where forty-nine figures in heavy cloaks stand ranked, staring down through round, pale masks at one lone figure that stands, unbidden, in the heart of their shadowed hall.

The figure is young, yet, but an observer could tell this only from the lack of lines in its face. By stance, by the breadth of the shoulders, by the deep smooth roll of its voice, by the reality-twisting _certainty_ that hums through every inch of it, it could be thirty or thirty thousand years old.

“The owl,” says the young man in the long dark coat, “is said to gather in a parliament. But if this is a court…then you should have a king.”

A voice emerges from under one of the identical staring masks, the sibilance of a loud whisper bleaching it of distinctiveness, as though the words might be formed by a confluence of all the rustling feathers. “And are you here to seek an audience with that king?”

“No,” the young man says. Amused. “He does not exist. I am here to become him.”

Laughter broken by low hooting ripples through the room—mocking, but less malicious than it might be. Almost there seems to be an indulgent note, as of adults at a dinner party interrupted by a small, outrageous child, risen from his bed without permission and demanding a place be laid among their number, a glass of wine filled to the brim for a tiny throat.

It is in this mood that an undisguised voice finally speaks, from the center of the narrow end of the long hall. “Now, Bruce,” begins the Speaker for the Court.

Speaker, in this place, is a position passed on not quite by appointment, and not quite by election, but more by a kind of silent understanding—and when there is some disagreement about what is understood, or one chairman dies without having indicated an acceptable successor, factions scrabble and flourish and occasionally remove competitors from play.

This system might have torn the whole edifice apart many decades ago, if it were not that the position of Speaker comes with only a few official powers, and accomplishing anything in it requires that one’s authority be accepted by the whole of the Court. It is a role taken more often in acknowledgment of the power already held, than in hopes of gaining more—and always when no one with the influence to interfere would not rather see the successful candidate in the role, than any other Courtier.

This is—has always been—the nature of the Court. A machine of blindingly self-interested parts, each contributing to the common advantage because the others can be counted on to maintain solidarity with them in turn. And because any who seeks to put himself too far above the rest, or turn his back on their conspiracy, will have the weight of the collective judgment cast upon them—and the Court’s judgment carries the sharpest of knives.

(There are those who would say that this is only a description of human society at its core, that the Court is merely more self-aware, more conscious of its own ebb and flow, that it is society without petty distractions, or the pretense that the rabble have any control over their fate, any more place in the processes of civilization than serfs or cattle. Enlightened self-interest, they say. The core of all human effort, they say, and smile.)

((There are those who say that darkness contains the only truth. That everything else is phantasms of reflection and wishful self-delusion.))

(((There are those that sip heart’s blood from tiny cups—no, it is pomegranate wine—no, it is nectar, dyed red by the setting sun—who sip and say, _we understand the way things really are,_ and smile.)))

This Speaker’s voice, even through the echoing effect of his mask, is deeper than most, and deliberate in a way that shows he is not young, though age has not yet cracked it. “Bruce,” he says again, cajoling. “The Waynes have always been a fine old family. Don’t imagine we do not recognize that. And it’s impressive that you’ve found your way here. If you wish to apply for membership I cannot imagine the Court would fail to ratify you.”

“I have no use for _membership_ , Colonel Kane,” the young intruder retorts, an edge of impatience creeping into his voice. His use of the man’s real name halts the titters, this time. There is silence, but for the rustling of cloaks. Satisfaction curls into the corner of the man’s mouth. The lower hem of his coat swings, as his stance shifts forward. “I do not come to you as a supplicant. I come because I think you may be of use to me.”

The members of the Court finally seem to reflect on the fact that this upstart _did_ find his way here, and make his way to their meeting hall unnoticed and unchallenged. One of them turns a masked face to a particular point, and makes a sign with one hand.

The lofty room is deep in shadow, and what light there is falls disproportionately on the ranks of Owls, marching up the margins of the hall toward the ceiling. The unoccupied wall into which the baroque entryway is set receives no direct light, and it is in the darkness by the door that a single shadow now sways into movement. It slides forward, along the base of the stands—it is behind the visitor, and need not fear his notice unless he turns, but it slinks anyway. If any Owls on the far side of the hall notice, they make no obvious gesture. Their expressions are hidden without need of effort on their part.

“Colonel,” the unwelcome visitor repeats, staring into the masked eyes of the spokesman, “I was surprised to learn you hold your family’s seat, when you have cousins that are never assigned away from Gotham.” He breaks eye contact, but without a grain of submission; more as though Colonel Kane is not worth his time.

“And Mr. Powers, you’ve been taking too much advantage of your access to Talon; those murders may not have been traceable to you but you _were_ the obvious beneficiary. Mrs. Stratton, this _is_ a change from all those evening soirees, even if the guest list hasn’t changed much. And Mr. Thomas, and Nigel St. Cloud…”

He rakes his eyes over all the company, slowly, naming each Owl in certainty as his sharp blue eyes seem to stare _through_ their masks, and they rustle uneasily until he comes to the end, looks them all over again and makes a sharp, dismissive sound behind his teeth. “There is not a single one of you,” he states, “who does not have some power in the world. And yet it is not _enough,_ is it? If any of you could rest content with what you have, you would not be here, in your masks and cloaks, playing games of intrigue. Let me be clear: what I propose is not a game.”

“Nothing we do is a game, young man,” declares the Owl addressed as Mrs. Stratton, and the voice is indeed that of an older woman, tones round and precise and just lightly stretched by age.

“Did it not occur to you,” the Speaker for the Owls says, “that we might be called a Court because we _sit in judgment?_ ” As he says this he gives the slightest nod, and the shadow-in-the-shadows _moves._

So does the young man.

His hand flies up, knocking aside the knife aimed at his throat; seizes the wrist attached to it and whirls, slamming his opposite hand into captured bone with a _crack._ The broken arm isn’t enough to make the attacker falter; the flat line of his mouth below his mask does not even tighten, and he pivots around the fixed point of his captured, damaged wrist to come in close. The wings of his heavy, feather-patterned cloak spread with the spin, exposing a heavy torso made barrel-like by armor, tapering to a waist that hints at chronic hunger. And a left hand holding a second, longer knife.

But the man who would be king has reached into his own coat and come out armed, his already impressive reach extended by the long brutal line of a machete.

He deflects Talon’s drive toward his gut, weaves out of the way of a powerful stab from the broken arm as it escapes his grasp, and kicks the silent assassin in his concave lower abdomen. He swoops into the opening this leaves, as Talon must first lean and then step backward to keep his feet, and excellent though the guard the masked shadow maintains with his two weapons is, the posture is still a vulnerable one.

The intruder knows just how to take advantage of that, lands a blow to the hip and then to one elbow, shattering a momentary hole in his opponent’s defense.

Brings the machete around with an easy, unconcerned grace that almost makes the blurring motion seem leisurely until, with a sharp _schluk_ , it severs Talon’s head at the neck.

Blood castoff scatters in a perfect arc, and the young man called Bruce brings a second heavy kick smoothly into the center of the armored chest, knocking head and body apart. Even as the bloodied blade is still in motion, a column of fire blooms from a small nozzle concealed just below his left palm, searing the flesh from the severed head as it rolls to a halt beside his feet, and then after the smell of scorched bone has had time to rise turns on the collapsed torso, bathing first the stump of the neck and then the whole fallen body in a flame more blue than yellow, until the flesh is itself on fire, cells burning away faster than even Talon’s healing could hope to repair them.

He shuts off the flame. Waits, in the smell of scorching hair and charring flesh, in the utter silence of a Court shocked past speech, until the flame has died down. Watches the remnant for long seconds, waiting for any sign of recovery, and then turns away. Almost, he seems disappointed.

Bruce Wayne bends, grasps the dark strigiform mask by one edge and lifts it, with its attached cape. Tips the still-smoking head out as if it were a spider in his shoe, and ignores the faintly crunching thud it makes when it hits the ground, though several courtiers flinch.

“So much,” he says, “for your ultimate assassin.”

He throws the scorched feather-patterned cape around his shoulders, and what was a mantle of equal parts terror and subservience on Talon seems to grow and spread, until it seems as though the young man has wrapped all the shadows in the dark underground hall around himself, a royal mantle of night. His voice is still even, perfectly controlled and unbroken by exertion, but now a banked rage thrums beneath it for everyone to hear. From behind his new, charred-flesh-scented mask, he rakes the company with a look of scorn.

“I made my invitation to you once already tonight: Peaceably, courteously, as if you were my equals. Let me now be more clear. Gotham is mine. There will be no negotiation. And while you can be useful to me, make no mistake: it would not upset my plans unduly to destroy you. Nor would it take any great effort.

“You know who I am. I can buy and sell each and every one of you, at the stock exchange or on some underworld flesh-dealer’s block, and I will not hesitate to do so. I know your petty secrets and your terrible ones. I can destroy anything you send against me.

“And I so swear,” he says, the picture of certitude, “that if you follow me in good faith, we will rule the world.”

The Court sits still, silent. Stunned. Half of them still expecting Talon to rise to his feet again and cut the interloper’s throat, but the more seconds draw on as the corpse lies smoking, the fewer expect it, and the more of them turn their full attention to the invader, the young man who is clearly no child.

“Well?” he asks, arch and confident, standing over the corpse of something they had thought could not be killed. “Shall the Court have its King?”

It is an Owl on the left who bends first. One of the few against whom he twisted no knife, leveled no threat. (Others will whisper, later, that this was prearranged, that it was through the treachery of this and perhaps some few others that their order was humbled at the feet of the last of the Waynes, the one great family of Gotham that had never been one of them before, the family they had struggled against for generations. But nothing is ever proven.)

One by one, the Courtiers bow, the Owls cast their eyes to the ground, the Court gives its allegiance.

Gotham’s king has his crown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the things that most struck me at first about the Court of Owls (besides the fact that for Batman to not have noticed them for so long they probably did literally almost nothing) was how unspeakably Victorian they are. They’re supposed to go back to the 17th ce., but masked secret societies were so trendy with the posh set in the 19th. A lot of their traditions probably date from then.
> 
> ^^ Silver St. Cloud was, appropriately enough, Batman’s most serious Silver Age love interest, and also came from old Gotham money. The Powers family is originally the villains from Batman Beyond, who took over WE after Bruce retired. Also appearing is (kinda-randomly-)evil Jacob Kane.
> 
> I still have a lot of plans for this 'verse, and a lot of stuff half or almost entirely ready to post, but I've kind of lost steam. Trying to get my posting momentum up again! XD Overdid it a little by mistake.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is complete. ^^

It is not that same night that the tide washes a battered form up out of the harbor, onto a pebbled beach that begins just south of the dockyards. It should be, really. It would make a better story, would add a symmetry to what is to be, the spice of the foreordained seasoning the inevitable.

But no, years have passed by this time; the Owl in his retooled armor has come to be a familiar sight, one his Courtiers defer to instinctively, many of them even without resentment, and there is a new Talon now, slipping through shadows in his wake, tiny and barely clothed, flaunting with every motion how difficult he is to hit, and how little it matters if he is.

The Court has gathered other new hands and feet, besides the child—a small rabble of varying grades of thug and crook and professional criminal who have accepted the idea of following a man whose face and name they are not allowed to know, in exchange for good pay and better weapons, and an increasing ability to walk out of police custody on hilariously low bail...so long as the circumstance of their arrest does not render them failure enough to be not worth redeeming.

And if, having agreed to betray their employer to the law in response to such abandonment, they face an equal certainty of a bullet, or a knife, or a noose in their cell…well, that is nothing new in their world, and the Owl pays well, and has a long memory.

Tonight, though, organized crime and the conspiracies that lie behind it are the last things in the mind of the woman walking along the beach. It may be a vast, ancient story, gathering its momentum, but history rarely looks like much from within the swell, and this young woman, who’s left her high-heeled shoes up at the top of the slope where the pavement ends wouldn’t care, even if it did.

And if she hadn’t wanted a moment with the ocean, to listen to the surf and think about the way the same sea washes against the island where she was born, and try to discount how different this wine-dark water is from the warmer, clearer waves of the Gulf. If she hadn’t come down the beach, picking her way from stone to stone to avoid the shards of broken bottles nestled into gravel…what would have become of the story? Would it have made sure to find some way of working out for the best, no matter what? Or latched onto another glinting madness, after this one died alone in the dark? Or would this have been the end of it?

(The sea, they say, has neither meaning nor pity. And it is mother to us all.)

((Some of us, however, have more than one time of being born.))

At first, she sees but doesn’t understand. A pale rock, she thinks, and then taking in the splayed, tumbled shape she thinks someone must have lost a bundle of clothes, a long-sleeved shirt stained dirty-white by the harbor filth, washed up as flotsam onto the rocks.

She realizes then that the trailing sleeve is stretched a few feet above the high-tide line, where the waves couldn’t have carried it. Blinks, looks again, and suddenly cannot imagine how she did not see the human body collapsed halfway out of the sea.

“Paula!” she shouts, already speeding up into a run, because she doesn’t want to know but she _has_ to, and therefore has to get it over with. She thinks she sees ribs move as if with breathing, but the body’s legs are still in the water and it might be just the motion of the surf giving an illusion of life to a corpse. “Paula get down here!”

She kneels—these stockings were wrecked anyway, or she’d have left them with her shoes, and her skirt ends inches above the knee—and he _is_ breathing. It is a he, she can tell now, facedown and naked, all limbs like a teenager; skinny, but with some breadth to the shoulders, and big hands. He’s stupidly pale and covered in goosebumps, but the latter is just more proof he’s not dead—probably; she’s never seen a drowned body before or anything.

She puts a hand on his shoulder and it’s cold. Bites her lip, and feels his neck for a pulse.

“Dios mío, Catalina, you found a dead guy so you need me so urgently?” complains Paula. But she hurried down, that’s what’s important.

“He’s not dead.” Now that she’s found a pulse, she can be more sure she’s not imagining the breathing. “Ayudame, already.”

Paula pulls a face. “I see enough naked white guys as it is sin que invite más en mis off-hours.”

“Such a Christian heart you have,” Catalina murmurs, and ignores the little snort she gets in response. She turns him over without help, carefully as she can, onto his back, because he _is_ breathing but lying on his face can’t be helping with that. No obvious injuries on this side, either. A couple of scars.

She taps the side of his face, for lack of a better idea. “Hello?” Paula snorts at her and Catalina looks up to narrow her eyes at her friend, which is of course when Human Flotsam awakes.

He rears up, suddenly, alarmingly; makes it about six inches toward sitting before momentum runs out and he falls back onto the stones. The breath goes out of him with an _oof_ when he hits, and the little choked breath he draws in afterward is completely pitiful.

The man’s eyes blink open, flutter unseeing. “Mister?” Catalina prods, re-closing a little of the distance she opened when he lunged. His head turns toward her voice, his eyes stutter back open. He manages to focus on her, pulls himself up again a little, braces with an elbow this time.

And then he smiles like a child.

That’s how she describes it, later, on the phone with her sister—sonreí como niño—and she can’t find better words when she tries.

It’s a smile that doesn’t belong there, on the face of a grown man shivering with cold, of someone abandoned with nothing, there beside the black water of Gotham at night. The simple gladness of it, not even at the hope of rescue or gentleness, but merely a sort of delighted _recognition_ that the wearer is looking out into the world and finding part of it looking back, out of another person’s eyes.

It should make him look mentally deficient, that he could have made it to whatever age he has and into such a dismal situation, and still smile like that. And to an extent it does, but Catalina prides herself on her ability to judge character, and there’s a certain sharpness in his long, funny-looking face and greenish eyes that seems to take in everything at once, and makes her doubt that his mind is all _that_ limited. Maybe he’s some sort of idiot savant.

“Evenin’, miss,” he mumbles, with a little duck of his head, and then his arm gives out, and he slumps back onto the stones. His eyes fly open again for a second, then flicker closed. But right up until he loses consciousness, and even after, the smile doesn’t quite go away.

Catalina looks up at Paula, who’s pushed her eyebrows all the way up her forehead, and now gives a little voiceless whistle. “Well, he _might_ be harmless.” She sighs, and shrugs out of her sweatshirt. “You work on the hypothermia, and I’ll ask Miguel to come down and help us carry him. Gotham Memorial?”

A grin breaking out at her friend in spite of everything as she reaches up and accepts the thin purple garment, Catalina drapes it over her foundling’s narrow goosebump-covered chest, then follows it with her own green windbreaker over hips and upper thighs, and starts chafing at his right hand with both of hers, hoping to get the blood flowing a little hotter, shakes her head. “Only if he takes a turn for the worst. I’m not so kind I’m rushing to pay for medicine.”

She _is_ kind enough to put him in her bed. Mostly because he’s about a foot too tall for the couch and treating hypothermia doesn’t work so well when the patient’s feet are sticking out into thin air. She’s short enough to fit on the couch, and she’s slept in worse places. She catches five hours before she needs to get up for her shift at the bookstore; checks up on her rescue. He’s still there, still breathing. She puts a cup of water and some crackers on the bedside table, empties most of her stash of cash into the inside pocket of her jacket because she’s not _that_ trusting, and leaves.

He’s still there when she comes back. Which is just as well, since he couldn’t have left without leaving the apartment unlocked for anybody to wander into, but she still pulls up sharpish when she lets herself in and he’s turning to look at her, six foot tall, wrapped in her bedsheet and holding a knife.

She almost slams the door again and leaves. _You’re gonna get yourself so murdered and the police won’t even investigate because your whole neighborhood knows you turn tricks more nights than you don’t,_ says a voice in her head that sounds a lot like Paula and a little like her mother. (Who doesn’t even know where most of the money Catalina sends home comes from, and never will if she can help it.)

But it’s _her_ apartment. She thinks this right before it registers that her knife-wielding piece of flotsam is standing over an onion in the little galley kitchen that faces the door, and then he smiles that ridiculous smile again, and she decides it’s safe enough to go inside. “Hi!” her guest says as she does so. “Is this your house?”

“No, I’m just cat-sitting. I assume you’re the cat.”

“Huh? Oh!” It takes him a moment, but he gets the joke, and laughs. It’s too loud, but it’s incredibly unthreatening.

He’s actually not bad-looking, Catalina observes detachedly. The chin is kind of unfortunate, but the mouth is nice enough if a little big, and you could _cut_ with those cheekbones, and not even because he’s underfed, though he is. Dry, his hair’s faded to somewhere between ‘sandy’ and ‘mousy’ on the brown spectrum, and it’s fine enough to have turned into an absolute cloud of cowlicks. She thinks he’s probably a couple of years younger than her.

Between that hair and that smile, though, he looks all of eight years old, and she’s calming down almost in spite of herself. She prides herself on being a good judge of character. She’s almost never wrong about who it’s safe to be alone with. This still seemed like a better idea when he was unconscious.

She jerks her chin at the onion sitting whole on the surface of her counter, outer layers of skin flaking placidly. “What exactly are you planning on doing to that onion?”

“Huh? Ah. I was thinking about maybe making an omelet. You want some? You have salami in the fridge, does a salami omelet sound like a good idea?”

Catalina opens her mouth and then closes it again. “Hello, I’m Catalina,” she says, ignoring the omelet question for now for the sake of her sanity.

“Hi Catalina, I’m—” The smile runs off his face, not suddenly but slowly, like an egg someone broke there and left to drip off. “I…don’t know.”

Bullshit, Catalina thinks, except she doesn’t really think so. “Well, does it feel like you’re a dangerous criminal or anything?”

His eyes aren’t actually all that big, he shouldn’t be able to look so soulful. “I don’t think so,” he says unhappily. “I mean. I just wanted to make an omelet.”

Catalina lets out something that isn’t quite a sigh. It’s not quite resignation or relief. “Okay,” she says. There’s no way she can kick him out just like that, and if she’s going to have a freeloader he might as well cook for her. “Break a few eggs. Yes salami, cut it up small, I know I have cheese and onions, use a lot.”

The smile comes back, a little less childlike but just as bright. “Yes ma’am!”

“The cutting board is over the sink,” she adds, and goes past him into the rest of the apartment to sit down.

Hey. She had a long day, on top of a long night.

Catalina puts on a Mexican soap and stares vacantly in its direction for a while, then gets annoyed with herself and picks up the nearest book. Her guest is humming as he works. She doesn’t recognize the tune.

She has to read every other sentence twice to get the meaning straight in her head, and not because it’s in English—she reads English even better than she speaks it. It’s not really because she’s listening for signs that he’s destroying her pan by not actually knowing how to cook, either. Three pages go by that way before her piece of flotsam turns off the stove and comes toward her, oblivious to all tension.

He’s cut the omelet into two messy chunks and served it up onto two of her plates, and he sits down next to her on the sofa with his plate of eggs without the slightest awkwardness.

“Remembered your name yet?” she asks.

He shakes his head, looking glum again.

“I’m going to have to call you something,” she says. “You remember anything yet?”

“I think…maybe it starts with _djh._ ” The consonant sound is really strange pronounced all on its own.

“Giovanni?” Catalina suggests at random.

Her guest sticks a forkful of omelet in his face and squinches it up like the food tastes bad, though it’s pretty clearly the name he’s tasting. The food is fine. “No, I think—it starts with J. The letter.”

“We’ll go with Joe for now, then,” she declares. Like hell is he a John.

He doesn’t seem thrilled with it, but he doesn’t have to be. He’ll probably remember his real name soon anyway, right?

By the end of the next day, she’s changed it to Joaquin. He likes that better, though it doesn’t especially seem _right,_ the way they both figure his real name would if they found it.

Joaquin crashes with her for another three days, on the sofa now that he’s out of the woods, after which Paula takes him at hers overnight, and then Miguel lets him sleep on _his_ couch. The deal is that Miguel will help him get a job and then Joaquin will start helping with the rent. This actually happens. Color her astonished.

He continues to not remember a damn thing, but he hangs around. Finds a different couch to sleep on after about a month on Miguel’s, eventually gets a place of his own. A friend of a friend gets him fake ID; Catalina helps him get a library card after she kicks him out of the store because it isn’t a library, stop that, if my loser friends all start hanging out here and reading the books I will get so fired. He changes his name at least twenty times before the fraught weekend when she finds out he’s the new Red Hood in town, at which point she revokes his name-choosing privileges and starts calling him exclusively Jack, because he’s fighting giants and he needs the luck.

He laughs, when she tells him so, and still looks impossibly harmless when he does it.

Paula’s parents and Catalina herself were born a long way away, but they are Gotham, as surely as the marble face of First National Bank or the tulips that come up every spring in Robinson Park. It might be Gotham sent them, because she wanted the _rest_ of the story, because dark certainty would never be complete without a counterbalance that was bright and glad and wanton—it might. Or it might be ordinary luck, and ordinary kindness.

All the same. He lived. And before very long, had tangled himself inextricably in Gotham’s favorite story. The man with a child’s smile was born from her harbor and he belongs to the city—no, rather, to the people who give the city life.

But to the city, too. Gotham found the piece she has been missing, and she does not let go of what is hers.

_Listen._

You can hear her laughing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m assuming Gotham’s segment of the Puerto Rican diaspora has vaguely Nuyorican experiences, though they may be fewer in number since Gotham’s history reads like a mashup of New York and Boston with a dash of Chicago thrown in for flavor. ^^;
> 
> (‘The sea has neither meaning nor pity’ was stolen from Chekhov's short story 'Gusev.')


End file.
